A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

With time going by, children’s education is getting increasing attention. Excellent children’s literature plays an important role in children’s growth, which has a direct effect on their recognition, mental development and linguistic formation. However, children’s literature works have been in a marginal position for a long time and does not get enough attention compared with adult literature works. There is a great imbalance between theory and practice on children’s literature translation research. With the increasing communication between China and foreign countries, more and more foreign children’s literature works are introduced to China, so it is urgent to start research on children’s literature translation and push forward children’s literature development.In the recent years, many scholars have studied children’s literature translation from different perspectives, such as manipulation theory, Skopos theory, and adaptation theory to study translation strategies, hermeneutics to study translators’ subjectivity, and relevance theory to study children’s language and so on. Few of them have studied it from the view of reception aesthetics. So in order to test the feasibility of reception aesthetics in children’s literature translation, reception aesthetics was applied to the comparative analysis of the two Chinese versions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the perspectives of horizon of expectations, readers’ role and status and indeterminacy. During the translation process, translators should bear children readers in mind and satisfy their aesthetic needs. Through the analysis, such findings can be found: First, given children’s reception ability, translation language should be simple, vivid and colloquial, catering for children’s specific horizon of expectations. Second, translators should deliberate over the indeterminacies. On the one hand, translators should fill the indeterminacy to reduce children’s reading difficulty. On the other hand, indeterminacy should be kept to arouse children’s imagination. Third, through the comparative analysis, it seems that though the two translations are both successful, compared with Chen Bochui’s translation, Ma Ainong’s translation comparatively considered children’s specialty from horizon of expectations, readers’ role and status and indeterminacy, so her translation is easier to be accepted by children.